Densho Digital Archive - Ben Tamashiro Interview

Densho Digital Archive
Loni Ding Collection
Title: Ben Tamashiro Interview
Narrator: Ben Tamashiro
Interviewer: Loni Ding
Location: Hawaii
Date: March 25, 1983
Densho ID: denshovh-tben_2-01-

<Begin Segment 1>

LD: You started saying, I'd like you to tell us again about, you said when you go to store sometimes you feel very inadequate. Would you tell us about that again, about the picket fence and all that? Tell us that again, tell us that story. And you said when you look at this, you feel very inadequate.

BT: Yeah, when I see this kind of thing, it kind of shames me, really, that I couldn't even read the wording on my mother's headstone, four-by-four block of wood that represented, that stood on top of her grave. We used to pour water over it and, I guess, rub our hands, say a prayer. But when I think of it now, it was such a beautiful thing, out in the lonely beach side, there's a little cemetery, Japanese cemetery, it was something like this, but it was closer to the beach, so it was sandy out there. But we used to have Kiawe trees like this all around. And hers, somehow I guess my dad built a nice little picket fence, it was painted, I guess, stained green, and there used to be a little latch on it. We used to open the latch and go in and pull all the weeds around that place. Then we used to bring along a gallon of water and pour it over the marker. And I guess the symbolism there is to cleanse the thing and so forth, and then you put the senko and little bowls of rice and oranges and whatever it is. And say our prayers, and then latch it and leave. Now this is a ritual we used to go through every year. I didn't particularly enjoy it, but I used to do it. And now that I'm at this age, I wish I could recapture the whole incident. I wish I had kept that headstone, I wish I had kept that picket fence.

Kent: Still had a wooden marker?

BT: Yeah, wooden marker, to find out what it said. To find out what it said. And, of course, when my dad... she died in 1918... when I was a year and a half, when I was a year and a half.

[Interruption]

LD: Just start with where you grew up, and that your mother died when you were a year and a half, so you grew up with your father and what he did for a living and what you did.

BT: Yeah, okay.

LD: Just those kind of things.

BT: And then about, oh, I guess about five years later, he remarried.

K: How old were you?

BT: Oh, I was probably about six, seven, eight, thereabouts, anyway. And in the interval, while I did not have a mother, I was sent off to live with my aunt in a town called Kalaheo, which is probably about ten miles away. And I remember going to school in Kalaheo as a first grader or kindergarten -- oh, they didn't have kindergarten in those days, we had first grade. So those very first years of schooling, I think I spent with my auntie over in this other town of Kalaheo. Then I guess my father remarried, then I came back to my hometown of Hanapepe, and then I grew up there 'til maybe about when I was twelve, I guess. Then he moved the [inaudible] up on the hill, which is Eleele, which is right next to McBryde Plantation. That's where I spent the rest of my years until I got into World War II in, I think it was 1940. One of the first drafts I volunteered for. And one of the reasons I volunteered for that is because I had a low draft number, and knowing that my time was coming up, I said, "Oh, well, I might as well get in." But I think the bigger motivation in back of volunteering was to get out. I'd been living there for twenty-three years then. I just couldn't see myself being stuck on a planation. I said to myself, "God almighty, is this the place for me?" The west end of the Hawaiian chain, you couldn't go any further west, almost, anyway. And even then, I used to dream about the other world outside of Kauai, because I used to do a lot of reading. I used to do a lot of reading. And through that reading, I guess I got some familiarity with the outside world, what some of the things were.

<Begin Segment 2>

K: What were the lunas like as supervisors?

BT: Well, in our time, we did not have too much trouble with them. But if we listened to our parents and others talk about them -- well, that's a horse of another color. In the early days, I understand, they used to come around with whips in their hands, and they used to ride horses. The horse itself is a symbolism of power, because nobody else had horses except the plantation managers. So the horse in itself represents power, and they come around and go up and down the fields, see that everybody's working, and crack their whips and so forth. In our time, by the time the '30s, came around by the time we kids used to work in the cane fields, we didn't have that kind of atmosphere. I guess the plantations got a little more civilized, a little more humanity in them, so we didn't experience any of those intense bowing to authority and doing the every move and so forth. We were very much on our own, we were just given a field to hoe, and we just go ahead and do it, wait for the end of the day, and then go on home, wait for the next day to come around. But they were always around, no question about it, always watching us. But unless somebody had a particular [inaudible] against, particularly, a luna, we wouldn't have too much of this confrontation. The confrontation was on the ground between the rats and the centipedes. The fields are full of rats and centipedes, and then battle each other.

<Begin Segment 3>

BT: So we used to swimming in the river, hike up to the falls, any mountain area, there'll be a falls somewhere around there. Oh, they used to have, up on the side of the mountain, they used to have a lot of flumes. I don't know if you know what a flume is, flume that was built along the mountainside to bring water from the mountain down to the cane fields. And the plantation used to build these flumes. Not to get the, say, source of the water, and get into the flume, and it will flow down into the low part of the valley into the cane fields. And it looks like a three-sided box with the top open, but the top would have little slats to hold the whole thing together, and the water would flow down there. And, of course, in times, the flumes would get nice and mossy, green, and they would have lot of opaes in there, the little shrimp. So what we, as kids we used to do is, we used to get into the flume and squeeze yourself in there, and just flow down with the water. And as you flow down, every once in a while you come across a place where there's opae, you know. We'd scoop it all up as it flowed down. Real nice, you know, because all nice and mossy, you'd flow down with the water. [Laughs] The other thing I started to explain to Kent, the kiawe trees, I don't see it now, but they give out nice long yellow beans, hard beans. But the cattle used to like it, so we used to take gunnysacks and collect these things by the bagful and take it over to the dairies who would buy that for something like ten or fifteen cents a bag. And so we used to make pin money. It used to be a wonderful source of income for a lot of kids.

LD: Tell us about that, the way kids would make some money.

BT: Yeah, I mean, there's not much money to be made, so every little bit helps.

LD: Like collecting bottle caps, or collecting old bottles, collecting returnable bottles.

BT: Yeah, yeah, of course, that's today's. In our time, it wasn't that. It was kiawe beans. This is as much indicative of Hawaii as the sugar cane, this kiawe tree. It's not endemic to Hawaii, it came over from France, story of how kiawe... the first Catholic priests were sent over to Hawaii from France. Couple of them managed to stick some of the seeds into their pocket, and they brought it over to Hawaii.

<Begin Segment 4>

BT: Well, we used to have a group of supervisors, they were called lunas. Luna meaning "high," and this is precisely where they were, physically, too. They used to come around on horses, leather riding boots, and leather whips in their hands. And these are all actual symbolisms of power, luna, what it implies. In the old days, according to our folks, it used to be real bad. Lunas used to come around and really whip the workers to get them to do more work out in the hot sun. And when they get into confrontations with the men themselves, they used to run them down with the horses. This is how bad it was. Whip 'em, and, of course, many of them would land in the hospital. But in our time, 1930s, things had improved, of course, and we weren't subjected to this kind of thing, although they were always there. There was no doubt about it; we knew who they were. And to give you an idea of how these things work, for instance, my father was a tailor, and although he wasn't an actual employee of the McBryde Plantation, he still was having his tailor shop on plantation land. So every year he had to make a tribute to the luna. So come New Year's time, he'd tell me to take three of my best chickens, "Let's bring it up to the luna's home." I said, "What for?" Well, said, "Because we've got to do it," and I used to object to those things.

[Interruption]

KL: What do you mean by your best chickens?

BT: Well, you know, I raised them myself. And I really didn't know how to raise chickens, but like any country boy, you go at it, and pretty soon you have a whole flock of chickens, maybe two dozen of them. But they were my chickens, I raised them myself. So when my father tells me to --

LD: Okay, you hit your mike. You say, "They were my chickens," you hit the mike. Start over again. "I raised these chickens, they were my chickens." Start over. "I raised these chickens."

BT: I raised these chickens myself, they were my chickens.

LD: Start off by saying, you're telling a story from that part. "I raised chickens, they were my chickens." Explain.

BT: I raised these chickens. They were my chickens. And when my father tells me to take the best one, I objected to this. Why should my best ones be given away? But he insisted on that. So I dutifully catch the three best chickens, get a gunnysack, cut three holes at the bottom, take one of the chickens, shove it down, stick its next out the whole, take the next one and do the same thing until I got three chickens. Then would tie up the bag, then we'd get into my old man's Model T, he used to have an old Model T touring car, and we'd drive up to Mr. English's home, the luna's home, which was just about a mile away. He'd knock on the door, Mr. English would come out, and my dad would make the tribute of the three chickens. And, of course, he'd say thank you and everything, but he wouldn't take it. He'd tell me, "Oh, take it out to the back, put it in the coop." So I'd go back there and I'd see there were these chicken coops, a whole row of them, and they're all stuffed with chickens because the others had already made the same tribute to him. And I'm looking at that thing and I'm saying to myself, "Now why does he need more chickens when he gets more than he can ever eat?" And I used to object to this thing. Here's a guy that had all he wanted, now I had to give him three more of my best chickens. That used to make me mad. And, of course, I think one of the other things that used to make me mad was the fact that when we knocked on the door, he would not personally take the chickens himself like you would expect the guy to take a gift, be thankful and everything else. No, he just said, "Take it to the back." And that used to rankle me. But that's how these things worked.

<Begin Segment 5>

BT: Yeah, one of the perennial questions that are asked of guys who have been around into different theaters of war, "How do you feel or how do you like all those places that you've visited," maybe not under the best of conditions, but countries normally foreign to most of us. Well, we've been to the mainland, and to the Midwest, New York, Washington, down through the South. And of course, speaking of girls, you see the whole range of girls, all beautiful girls, you see a wonderful country out there, then you go overseas, see a bit of north Africa and Italy, see a lot of Italy. A lot of Italy, much of it in ruins, of course. So by the time I came home through Seattle, Washington, having passed through San Francisco and parts of Oregon to get to Seattle, I had seen quite a bit of the country that I had never expected to see. Well, you know, after being away for something like almost two and a half, almost three years, I came back to Hawaii and I thought Hawaii was the most beautiful place in the whole wide world. Even the girls that I used to know, little girls when I left the islands, who used to be young, pigtails, some even still in hanabata stage. When I came home, all of a sudden I viewed them in a different light. They had blossomed out into beauties. And I thought this was the most fascinating evolution that had taken place while I was gone. I didn't know how it happened, but after seeing the rest of the world, I thought nothing could beat Hawaii.